Library Notes: Welcoming a new member to the library staff

Saturday

Dec 15, 2012 at 8:03 AMDec 15, 2012 at 8:16 AM

Hello, Ames. My name is Tanvi (pronounced TAHN-vee) Rastogi. I am the new teen librarian at Ames Public Library and here are some things about me: I currently live in central Jersey and work as a youth services librarian with children ages birth through YA at Hunterdon County Library in Flemington, N.J. I love reading but didn't always, mainly as a middle and high school student, which I hope helps me better understand the "everyone wants me to read" woes of customers who are reluctant readers.

Hello, Ames. My name is Tanvi (pronounced TAHN-vee) Rastogi. I am the new teen librarian at Ames Public Library and here are some things about me: I currently live in central Jersey and work as a youth services librarian with children ages birth through YA at Hunterdon County Library in Flemington, N.J. I love reading but didn’t always, mainly as a middle and high school student, which I hope helps me better understand the “everyone wants me to read” woes of customers who are reluctant readers.

I love music, especially bands from the ’80s — the Smiths, Feelies, Bats, Go-Betweens — and I co-hosted a show at a radio station for several years. I have a deep affection for Dunkin Donuts coffee and am slightly ashamed (I usually choose local) to admit how thrilled I was to discover that one will soon be opening in Ames.

I love the East Coast — the cities (New York, Philadelphia and Montreal are second homes), the ocean, the music and how quickly life moves — and will miss it all dearly, but I’m thrilled for this opportunity to work with everyone at APL. I recently spotted — in a football field-sized parking lot, in a sea of New Jersey plates — a Story County, Iowa, license plate on a car parked directly across from my own. Either way, like the book says, Story County, here I come.

My favorite authors are Roald Dahl and Robert Cormier. I began reading Mr. Dahl as a kid and “Matilda” is my favorite of his children’s books. I was not a very adventurous child (I was terrified of small dogs, roller skates, and, above all, escalators) and was drawn to characters such as Matilda and Claudia Kincaid (“From the Mixed Up Files”) — girls who had adventures, but were, more than anything, thinkers and planners like me. Other juvenile fiction favorites include “The Westing Game” and the Harry Potter books.

I like writing that grants power to the powerless, and writing that’s a little bit twisted and a little bit creepy. Roald Dahl is the master of each of these writing styles and while I love his children’s titles, it’s actually his adult short story collection, “The Best of Roald Dahl,” that’s my favorite.

Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War” is my favorite young adult title because of its unflinchingly brutal and completely honest finale. In Christopher Paul Curtis’s “The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963,” Byron Watson has a poignant moment with his younger brother after a black church is bombed in an attack fueled by racism: “’Kenny, things ain’t ever going to be fair…But you just gotta understand that that’s the way it is and keep on steppin’.’”

I’ve got a soft spot for characters (and people) like Kenny and Byron and Cormier’s Jerry Renault and Sherman Alexie’s “Junior” (“Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”) who keep on steppin’. No surprise then, that one of my favorite books is Ralph Ellison’s inimitable “Invisible Man.”

Because I need to stay sane, I read humor, too. David Sedaris, Terry Pratchett, P.G. Wodehouse and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” each have a place on the bookshelf in my heart.

Many of my non-fiction reading choices are informed by my inordinate love of the field of sociology (my undergraduate major) and politics, the latter being something I love tremendously despite the ulcer it’s going to give me once day. Favorites include “Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches,” the youth title “Hitler Youth” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and the recently published “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.

I am also a huge New York Times addict. I began reading the paper with a bizarre fervor as an undergraduate at Rutgers, refreshing the website for news updates with the same zeal my boyfriend demonstrates when creating and lovingly tending to his team each fantasy football season. I had the pleasure several years ago of meeting Gail Collins, author and op-ed columnist at the Times, and I’ve clung to a not-so-secret dream of casually bumping into columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman.

I could go on, but I’m out of room. I guess I could sum up myself like this: I believe in libraries, and I can’t wait to join you in Ames.

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